- Joined
- Mar 16, 2019
Ultimately the problem they all fail to address is that comics cannot succeed if their target audience is 40-50 year old men who got into comic books decades ago. Manga is booming nowadays for the same reason comics got big in its heyday: being cheap entertainment for 10-12 year old boys.
If he maintains his trajectory I think Eric can run a profitable and sustainable business selling primarily to disgruntled Marvel/DC fans. But while that may be perfectly satisfactory for Eric’s wallet, it’s hardly going to move the needle for the industry.
Unfortunately for diehard comics fans, as I've witnessed, pride ultimately comes before common sense. I have witnessed since the 2000s when anime and manga made their boom from the diehards saying "they'll just go away as a fad", when 20 plus some years later I can remember the likes of Rurouni Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Naruto heading the charts and popping up in both the bookstores and on cable TV and Final Fantasy VII and Megaman ruled the video game market. There's also the long unquoted fact that females also had selection to choose from with manga and the aforementioned above also wasn't engrossed in excessive horseshit like the Comics Codes that could allow actual story content that could also get in female viewers and readers than simply wearing tight spandex and capes while punching back and forth for the majority of the book.American comics as they exist today, are over. This is the wooden ship building I was talking about. People from around the world go to these ye olde coastal towns and watch people put together a sailing ship with wooden mallots, horsehair brushed on paints and seals, etc. etc. This is what making comics is today. Marvel, DC, IMAGE, etc. are all big names in the antique sequential market, they can't afford to change their entire operation, all they can do is wither away to nothing like their audience.
Going forward, a fusion of American moral driven comics, and character driven manga will emerge from the ashes of the current comic book industry. You need only look at any market place for graphic novels, manga rules the shelves.
It'll be years before the faithfuls realize that they're the wooden sailing ship, competing with the steam powered ocean liner.
Somehow, Ya Boi Zack noticed this but hasn't taken direct action to course correct:
Something also I've come across and been wanting the right moment to say is that whether you love it or hate it and I don't fucking care, anime and manga already made its cultural mark in the United States. Everyone can cherrypick weeaboo antics but those Japanese comics and cartoons with pastel hair, big eyes, big boobs (or moe moe uguu girls), energy powers and huge swords have cemented themselves as being a symbol of creativity and freedom out here in the USA, no matter what the "no u" pearlclutching shipsinking martyrs say. Anime and manga, whether it noticed or not, merely existed and caused its fans out here to have fucking balls and yell back at censors while the money and the artistic integrity was the muscle that told them, the morality in media fuckers, and government horseshit to fuck off or else. Superheroes on the other hand, caused a nuclear winter wasteland causing cataclysm the likes of Kingdom Come to its own industry back in 1993 and even before that, for decades, did nothing but cower and be fucking ratso motherfuckers for its own bottom line while it sold out its image for both the censors and the government to use them as a propaganda machine. You want to know why so many US anime and manga fans stated in the open "American comics and cartoons suck!" back in the day? THIS was why. And if you think this only happened in the 2000s, hahaha, oh, oh, no, it didn't. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes openly made strips mocking and warning us about how comics had devolved into schlock made by committee before the 1993 collectors crash ever happened and openly stated how much he fucking hated comics being treated as trash from its own creators. This shit has been going on before some of you were even sperm in the comfort of your daddy's scrotum.
Again, you of Comicsgate/Anti-Comicsgate want to fix comics? You have an uphill battle up the fucking mountain, and it's one steep ass fucking crag eroded by the winds of change and ravages of time. Seitengrats and zip lines aren't going to fucking help you to the summit; they're good for nooses for an heroing for those who can't make it to the top but can't come back down. I remember coming across a conversation by some smug high basement dwellers on a forum outside of this place saying "Well if manga is easy to get out of, comics must be the opposite!" Yeah, I guess it must be very hard to let go of that collector's bubble investment that I recently found at the dollar store that sold for 60 cents after they unearthed it from a fucking warehouse. Keep clutching hard to them pearls, maybe you'll bring them with you to your grave and die buried under them.
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